CVE-2026-23888

Date: January 26, 2026

pnpm is a package manager. Prior to version 10.28.1, a path traversal vulnerability in pnpm's binary fetcher allows malicious packages to write files outside the intended extraction directory. The vulnerability has two attack vectors: (1) Malicious ZIP entries containing "../" or absolute paths that escape the extraction root via AdmZip's "extractAllTo", and (2) The "BinaryResolution.prefix" field is concatenated into the extraction path without validation, allowing a crafted prefix like "../../evil" to redirect extracted files outside "targetDir". The issue impacts all pnpm users who install packages with binary assets, users who configure custom Node.js binary locations and CI/CD pipelines that auto-install binary dependencies. It can lead to overwriting config files, scripts, or other sensitive files leading to RCE. Version 10.28.1 contains a patch.